Day four started well with Oracle Optimizer: Best Practices for Managing Optimizer Statistics presented by Maria Colgan. Then followed SQL Tuning Expert Roundtable with Jagan Athreya, Benoit Dageville, Tom Kyte and Graham Wood. These two presentations had a lot in common, correct statistics should be checked if plan is wrong, note correct, but not necessarily updated statistics. If an automatic routine for stats gathering cannot be found the metadata for the table and columns should be set manually and locked. More people talk about skews this day, it was mentioned here also, but I guess James Morle and Cary has more to say on that. The problem with histograms, bind variables and bind peeking is somewhat easier in 11g with adaptive cursor sharing, but not a 100% solution according to the panel. One 11g feature I'm going to look more into is extended statistics.
The third and last presentation for me was Powerful New Ways to Use Oracle Data Guard for Planned Maintenance with Larry Carpenter. This stuff requires a lot of consideration and planning. Downtime, complexity and risk. Finding a solution that lowers especially the last two is important. Another presentation I have to digest.
At 17:00 I went to Pythian's bloggers meetup. Met a lot of guys IRL that I've been following on Twitter and whose blogs I've been reading for years. Impressive event and very social. Pythian just ranked even higher. Tim Hall won the prize for having collected most signatures, my collection in the picture. I was too busy talking to people, but got a fair share of signatures. Loved it all.
